Friday morning, a long week behind with too many tasks and too few hours of rest in between them. My ass is dragging and the freshly ground, freshly brewed, strong as Hercules black coffee I am transfusing doesn't seem to be the thing. I have a to-do list as long as my socks. So the last thing I want is to have to jack Mom back up the hill, laden down with a fresh load of BS that is 87% water.

But in this kind of country, there's no way around; you can't get theah from heah and you can't pick up a phone and order it done. Nope, you're on your own resources out here. So if you want the whole thread jacked up, man, you get to do the jacking.

Makes ya self-sufficient, resourceful, gives you spine and the right to look any other man in the eye with quiet pride, knowing you have made your own way and jacked up your own threads, are not a city slicker who needs help from hired hands just to wash dishes, or a bumpkin who can't find his way north from south. Yer a man, me son. Hit that submit button, and walk tall.

That acid can be bad stuff, man. A friend of mine tried it and either spent hours staring at the sun or decided to fly around the roof of the Empire State Building or maybe both, ya know? And the flashbacks can get ya at the worst times, like when you're getting married or in church or at your mom's funeral or when you're driving at, like 90 miles per hour, ya know? And then you can get some windpane, which is mixed with, like, strychnine, and even though you can get a jagged high you can die from the strych, ya know? So you'd, like, be better sticking with, like, grass, ya know?

Hey Mom, since the kids' computer did a crash and burn this afternoon we're going to play a board game tonight (they're setting it up now). We got some ice cream and are all set for snacks. Earlier this evening I had them exit the house by the front door and walk quietly around to the side, where we fed June bugs to four toads that live around that side porch. You have to flick them close enough that the toad is willing to move to get it. No hand-feeding here. You see the toad move, but the tongue is so fast it's amazing. (We're easily entertained around here at times).

Pong was, I believe, the first computer video game, although I remember a tic-tac-toe game at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry in the '50s or early '60s -- it was played against a computer, but Pong was the first commercially viable game.

Curiously enough, yesterday my 14-year-old son was asking me about the age of video games because something that came his way advertised 50 years of entertainment. The company that originated PacMan, I think. I remember those turning up when I was in high school, or maybe early in college. I told him the same thing--pinball was the big game until the arcade games came along. I got pretty good at some of those--they feel more like you're playing a game, not just standing there with the joysticks. You rock and roll and tip and lean and try not to tilt. . .

I don't remember any video arcades when I was a kid, MMario. All I can recall back in those days was pinball machines and those Italian soccer thingies...manual stuff. I didn't play those, and they weren't that common anyway...not like video arcades are now.

I can well recall when the very first computer games came out...and I was an adult by then (sort of...).

Gram was a woman who could pin you to the wall and flay you with her glare at 50 paces. Most of the community lived in terror of her "look". Parents threatened their children with her (Truth!) - and those who were NOT afraid of her hadn't met her.

And if our books were returned late there was no excuse. The librarians chained you to a post by your thumbs while you stood on a pile of boards (barefoot, and the boards were roughsawn). Then they knocked the boards out from under your feet, one board for every day overdue. You were then scourged with a cat-o-nine tails and keelhauled.

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran And the PC was only a toy And we did our computing by gaslight When I was a boy.

Amos, there WERE no computer games or text messaging programs when I was a kid. What there was, was TV. Other kids watched TV. I read books. This gave me quite an advantage over most of my peers when it came to writing essays in school, I can tell you...

Little Hawk I also was like that. I remember when I was about 9 or 10 checking out a handful of horse adventure stories one week (by an author I had just discovered) and I read and read and read, parked on the living room couch. My mother would come in every so often to see if I needed anything (food) and just left me alone. Then there was the summer when I was 14 or 15 and I discovered Jane Austen. My mother had a big bound collection of all of her novels, and I worked my way through that thing cover-to-cover on all those summer evenings in my bedroom. The one reading light was on, the window was open, and I had pillows and a chair so I could move around from bed to chair for comfortable positions, but it was a lost summer of reading. I had a radio on in the room and some of the strangest songs, played regularly back then, take me back to that summer when they come on the oldies radio now.

Last time I was in Seattle I went over to take a look at my old neighborhood in West Seattle (where I lived until I was 11). When I was a child they opened a new branch library on 35th St, and we used to make the walk over there on many weekends. We were gluttons for the summer reading program. I'd guess it was a couple of miles from the house. That branch is now undergoing renovations to modernize it and turn it into a two story structure, is my understanding.

We moved to Everett and there we had a beautiful old Carnegie library building to visit. That one was probably a mile and a half from the house and again, we usually walked there. It was on my way to and from high school so I was there a lot after school.

Our library was over twenty miles away, all of it uphill both ways except when it went through swamps and through blistering hot deserts, and we had to walk it in molten lava up to our shoulders while the Kickapoo waited in ambush in every canyon and pass not otherwise ambuscaded by the Confederates and/or the enemy du jour. Oh, how I longed for a bicycle back then! but we were too poor to afford more than a dented front wheel! Ah, the joys of youth and of the days that are gone beyond recall! Ah, those dear dead days of yore!

The local library was right around the corner from our house when I was growing up - and a major punishment was to be forbidden to go to the library. It never lasted long though - we got into too much trouble when we didn't have anything to read.

As a result of my reading, when I took physics in high school I did really lousy with the first half of the book, which dealt with mechanics. The second semester was on nuclear, and I went from a D to an A+. Likewise in analytic geometery, when we got to things like points on an ellipse I did very well -- because it was related to planetary orbits.

I must say that I drove my mother crazy. I'd check out six books on Saturday and have them finished by Sunday night. Except for ones like Korsunsky's "The Atomic Nucleus." The math slowed me down on that one (and I'm not making this up). My siblings were the same way.

I gave my kids an ultimatum today. They have to do some reading this summer, they can't just watch TV, play games, and chat on the computer. My son wanted to know how long he had to read his book (I gave him The Andromeda Strain). I told him that if he doesn't reach a point where he can't put it down and just finishes it, that I thought a week was pretty reasonable. So he did the math and read enough pages today so that he can pace himself to read it in a week. My daughter refused my suggested book (Invisible Man) and read something left over that she picked up during the school year. It was amazing, for a couple of hours, no other keystrokes and game voices, just comfortable chairs and good reading lamps and heads bent over books. :)